March 6, 2014

Thursday Hillary Bash - On the record on Obamacare

Hillary Clinton has chosen to side with those behind Obamacare. It's somewhat surprising. She used the opportunity to unfairly portray Republicans as anti-people. But to go on record in support of a government program that is losing ground in the battle of public opinion month after month, is somewhat odd.

It's not as if she hasn't said anything in support of Obamacare previously. But the timing seems odd, making statements about it now.

Hillary Clinton showed more signs of flexibility Wednesday on how Obamacare is implemented, but she insisted the law is too important to “turn the clock back.”

In a question-and-answer session following a lecture at UCLA, Clinton suggested she’s open to different ways of achieving the health law’s goals. She praised Arkansas — the state where she and her husband rose to political fame — for carrying out a new approach to expanding Medicaid coverage, by using the federal money to buy private health insurance for more than 100,000 low-income residents....

“I think it’s important for people to realize what’s been accomplished. There’s been an enormous amount of, frankly, misinformation and disinformation,” Clinton said.

She also used a line of defense that other Democrats have encouraged: Obamacare will help end “job lock,” in which people hang on to a job they don’t like because they’re afraid their health problems will prevent them from getting insurance again if they move.
“I have said many times that if we were starting from scratch, we wouldn’t have built an employer-based system,” Clinton said. But since that’s the system we have, she said, it’s important to make it work.

(emphasis added).

Going on record, particularly with the piece emphasized above, is perhaps meant as a way to gain credence with the liberal base for the Democratic primaries, which she may assume, once won, will grant her a cakewalk to the White House against all comers from the GOP side of the election. But with a shrinking percentage of the American people approving of the law, equivocating on the specifics is like the proverbial re-arranging of deck chairs on the Titanic.